Episode 251 – Paul Karasik & Mark Newgarden

“Ernie Bushmiller used to say, ‘You gotta do the job right,’ and we took him at his word.”

How deep can deep reading go? Paul Karasik & Mark Newgarden talk about the 10-year project of exploring a single Nancy strip, for their new book How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels (Fantagraphics). We get into the wonders of Ernie Bushmiller’s signature strip, the transformative class they took with filmmaker Ken Jacobs, the malfunctioning tape recorder that led to the whole project, the challenges of getting Jerry Lewis to write the book’s foreword, Nancy’s role as proto-feminist, and more! Plus, I get them to talk about the secret story of the first time they met, where their collecting impulse came from, the pleasure of finding a good flea market, Art Spiegelman’s strength as a teacher, how each of them teaches comics and how a lot of students have no sense of comics history, and how they keep the “ick” in “academic”! Give it a listen! And go buy How to Read Nancy!

“Nancy was a guilty pleasure when I was kid, if it even WAS a pleasure. There was something odd about the strip that gave me the creeps.”

Mark Newgarden is an acclaimed cartoonist whose work was collected in We All Die Alone. He is also the the co-author (along with his partner, Megan Montague Cash) of Houghton Mifflin’s bestselling Bow Wow series of children’s books. He lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.